In Javits Expansion, Old Dreams Revisited

Mr. Rogers, say hello to Mr. Freed. James Ingo Freed, who died last month at 75, might have had some advice for Richard Rogers, the London-based architect, on his $1.7 billion expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

A quarter-century ago, Mr. Freed proudly unveiled his own design for the original Javits, a shimmering glass pavilion overlooking the Hudson River. By the time it opened seven years later, he was sighing with disillusionment about what might have been. After being picked over by government bean counters, the final design was a gloomy steel-and-glass shed, testifying to the lowest-common-denominator mentality typical of government-sponsored building projects.

Mr. Rogers's expansion, unveiled last week by state and city officials, resolves some of those shortcomings of Mr. Freed's building, adding a more transparent facade and opening up the complex to 11th Avenue. Extending five blocks from 34th to 39th Street, it might be viewed as a low-key version of the colorful façade of the Pompidou Center, the bustling populist landmark in Paris that Mr. Rogers created with Renzo Piano in the 1970's.

Like the Pompidou, the Javits façade is conceived as a kind of ant farm crawling with urban energy. Its towering glass wall will be broken up by a series of stair and elevator towers -- yet to be designed -- that align with the street grid and visually lock the building into its surroundings.

Inside, a public concourse runs the length of the building. An enormous steel canopy supported on slender columns is to provide shade for trees, cafes and retail shops outdoors. Strung along 11th Avenue, they should help to energize what is now a dead urban wasteland.

Yet a series of constraints imposed on the design by state planners -- the loss of a roof garden, the elimination of meeting rooms overlooking the Hudson -- seem to assure an outcome that would have been familiar to Mr. Freed: a decent but not particularly dazzling work of architecture.

This time the limitations were not purely a matter of finances: post-9/11 security concerns led the state to demand compromises.

Embarrassed by the rejection of a Jets stadium for the West Side and the endless squabbling about the design for a Freedom Tower at ground zero, city and state officials overseeing the Javits project seem to be in a mad rush to push it through. With shadowy political maneuvering, they have stifled the kind of public debate that could have led to a more ambitious vision for the convention center and the decrepit neighborhoods next to it. Meanwhile, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York yesterday attacked the design, calling for a bigger convention center -- an idea that would only compound the problems by blocking more of the waterfront.

Plus ça change. When Mr. Freed began work on the original Javits Center design in the late 1970's, the sentimental fictions of Woody Allen's Manhattan had taken hold, replacing vigilante movies like "Death Wish" as the major box office draw, and the city was emerging from its image as a Sodom of urban blight, crime and poverty. Convention centers were viewed as a weapon against suburban white flight: a tourist-friendly formula shared by cheery festival marketplaces like South Street Seaport and, later, tarted-up historic districts like the 42nd Street redevelopment area.

Mr. Freed's design, which in some ways has been unfairly maligned, was a product of that era. Its enormous glass-clad frame was promoted as a crystal cathedral whose transparent skin and bustling interior halls would enliven the neighborhood. Mr. Freed even included a "galleria" lined with ethnic food halls that were intended to draw visitors through the building and out to a concrete balcony overlooking the Hudson River.

The galleria, dropped because of budget cuts, was no great loss. Other cuts, like a skylight that would have made the lobby far more open and airy, were more damaging. And instead of a crystal palace, the city got a dark, forbidding mass because the technology did not yet exist to prevent a clear building from turning into a furnace. A moat-like drop-off lane that severs the building from 11th Avenue reinforced the sense of isolation.

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The design by Mr. Rogers -- with FXFowles and A. Epstein & Sons -- resurrects elements of Mr. Freed's dream -- even if his experience evokes Mr. Freed's nightmares. To save money, Mr. Freed had to shave off considerable exhibition space. In addition to its northern extension, the new design will add another level to the existing structure, creating another 500,000 square feet of exhibition space so that the center can compete with newer, bigger convention halls in other cities.

The simplicity of Mr. Rogers's structural solution is appealing. A grid of steel columns, set 90 feet apart, was used to support Mr. Freed's structure; for his new story, Mr. Rogers has designed a more open grid of columns, set at 180-foot intervals, creating the illusion that the building is getting lighter as it rises.

It's an elegant plan, but no sane person would call it one of Mr. Rogers's great achievements. Of all the architects who came to prominence in the 1970's, he is probably the most unrepentant of the high-tech Modernists. His best buildings, like the Lloyd's insurance building in London and the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, are brash muscular urban machines. So far, the Javits design lacks that structural bravura. Comparatively subdued, it is an elegant practical solution to a nagging set of problems, without the poetry that you expect in a major civic building.

The failings have more to do with political considerations than with Mr. Rogers's talents. With typical shortsightedness, state and city officials set the budget for the convention center expansion before a design was even submitted. As a result, officials fearful of being labeled spendthrifts keep lopping off design elements to abide by the arbitrary budget limit. The public roof garden proposed by Mr. Rogers to take advantage of sweeping views of the Hudson was rejected as too expensive, as were a series of meeting rooms that would have overlooked the river along the west façade.

Those features, part of an effort to draw the public into and over the building, would have gone a long way toward wedding the convention center to its environs.

Compounding those failures, security concerns led planners to abandon the idea of underground marshaling yards where trucks would be stationed before loading and unloading equipment for convention center events. Mr. Rogers had originally envisioned creating a 420,000-square-foot space for that purpose just to the north of the convention center expansion. But security experts said they would need roughly 80,000 additional square feet for security teams to search the trucks once they entered it.

Because that demand made burying the garage prohibitively expensive, Mr. Rogers proposed creating a six-story parking structure between 39th and 40th streets. The building faces a block-long Metropolitan Transit Authority parking garage to the north, an ugly barrier between Midtown Manhattan and the river.

The city can't be blamed for all this. A short list drawn up last August for the site was made up of highly reputable architects. Two of the proposals, by Rafael Viñoly Architects and Grimshaw, are similar to that of Mr. Rogers, enormous decorated sheds that strain to make a connection between the neighborhoods to the east and the waterfront. A design by Thom Mayne's firm, Morphosis, took a more original approach to its urban context, burying most of the marshaling yards underground and reducing the building's scale to create a public garden at the end of 40th Street. The biggest problem isthat the city and state machine is so caught up in practical details that it has become incapable of thinking imaginatively about the big picture. As many have pointed out, the new convention center building is a critical piece of a vast puzzle that includes the rezoning of the Hudson Yards, the West Side rail yards and potentially even Madison Square Garden -- one of the largest urban development projects in Manhattan in a generation.

Although Mr. Rogers's design is more promising than, say, the defunct Jets stadium proposal ever was, it reflects a narrow view of how cities grow. For the time being, bold urban planning remains a chimera here.